Orthodoxy
by ohtasha
Summary: Soft heart, soft hands, soft mind, failure. For the Crawleys and those associated with them, failure is never an option. Success is the creed they adhere to.


orthodoxy: adherence to accepted norms.

vaguely inspired by jay z and kanye- "we formed a new religion, no sins as long as there's permission"- and the 1975- "we're dressed in black from head to toe, with guns hidden under our petticoats"

* * *

1.

God moves in small ways, though Robert is inclined to think that this time, He's outdone Himself. Laid the best-set plan to ruin in the meanwhile, but that's no matter: Robert can't help but marvel over the sheer perfection of what has transpired. No one will know, now.

One can't afford to be soft hearted in this line of business; soft heart, soft hands, soft mind, failure. It's a slippery slope and Robert has no intention of watching the stone slide to the bottom of the pit, before dirtying his hands as he attempts to remedy the situation. So he and Mama and Cora all agree: Patrick, like Isaac, must be sacrificed for the greater good. Robert, unlike Abraham, must succeed, and failure is not a Crawley trait. Hardened heart, steady hands, resolved mind. Victory.

Remarkable, really, how so many of the best laid plans involve water: Noah, Jonah, and Robert had had every intention of following suit. The ship of dreams, they called it, and the Titanic would deliver him from this living nightmare. A generous tip to the right man, a vial of aconite decoction and no one would be any the wiser. _TRAGEDY ON THE TITANIC_, the society page by-lines would run, _FATHER AND SON BOTH DIE_. Then an appropriate period of mourning and heads bowed, a few months of 'yes-thank-you's, 'such-a-shame's and 'our-prayers-are-with-them's. No one need know how marvellously their prayers had been answered.

Robert sits at the breakfast table, almost ignoring his tea (it wouldn't do to seem too nonchalant), and tries not to laugh, to burst into song and proclaim the wonders of the world. _TITANIC SINKS_, runs the Times' headline, dominating the page just as the event is beginning to dominate and shape Robert's morning. The scope of such a miracle is beyond comprehension. What better a way to remove a problem, though it irks Robert somewhat that the family can't really claim the glory for this act. Even they have yet to orchestrate a hit of this magnitude.

But it's sorted and it's done and the problem has been dealt with in the most beautifully public and innocent way of all. Mary will reign after him, the good Mary, Mary the Blessed. So Robert excuses himself with dignity and decorum, shell-shocked from delight and triumph, and wanders through the house that has been saved. The village bells ring out to mark the hour and his mind turns to Church, to hymns, to Psalms.

_Psalm 117: Praise the LORD! For great is his love towards us._

And how great it has proved to be.

2.

What is it that lies between failure and success, Mary wonders. What word so perfectly encapsulates the middle ground that can be applied to this assignment: completed, of course, as one would expect from a Crawley venture, and yet there are whispers and raised eyebrows that defy convention.

As usual, the blame, in Mary's eyes, rests solely on Edith. That Pamuk didn't fall from his horse, that he didn't drink the aperitif they had prepared for him, that his heart didn't miraculously give way cannot, even from Mary's perspective, be attributed to her sister; but that all of society has to know the way in which his demise came about is most certainly Edith's fault. Mary is not one to forgive and forget; forgive that rumours now circulate amongst their type of people that her skill set most certainly extends to the bedroom, forget that her reputation has suffered irreparable damage at her sister's hands.

And she will, she vows (and she swears it like a Benedictine oath), have her revenge. The success of the assignment- however it happened, Pamuk is dead and the Home Office can rest easy- is what raises Mary from perdition, what stops her from being cast forever more as a pariah by those of her world, but she will respond in time, in kind.

_Exodus 21:23-24: But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot._

Mary will take so much more. As Edith took from her, as Pamuk stole. For that alone he deserves his punishment, Mary believes, and it's a conviction she treasures on nights when he chases her through dream states; when the eyes of the ballroom are turned on her.

3.

Bates is beginning to understand the holiness of peacekeeping, for he has brought the seven plagues upon himself, upon Downton, upon the Crawleys and upon Anna. The first is deception, the sort that does not rest easy when your head touches the pillow and sends waves of sweat crashing down on your palms. The second is enlightenment: the shadows in which the house operates, in which they all function, being forced to recede in the wake of searchlights and the whites of querying eyes. The third is control, the likes of which they cannot bear because they are all, for the first time, under the watchful gaze of something bigger than themselves. The fourth is investigation, which runs its fingers over the minute cracks in his façade, in Anna's, in the family's, and tries to prise them open. The fifth is judgement, that which the Crawleys are far more accustomed to passing themselves than having hanging over them. The sixth is attention and more fatal than its predecessors by far, and the seventh… The seventh is the Hangman's Noose, which dangles past the end of his nose and coils itself around the Abbey.

But Vera was a pestilence and death proved to be the antidote, so God help him, Bates knows that he would do the same again. He is the exorcism where she is the Devil (not such a fallen angel), and the Crawleys have taught him well: he's not far off omnipotent, damn near untouchable. They won't catch him for this, won't pin him on a cross and nail his guilt into him.

He and the Crawleys know better than that and they're turning water into wine, flour into freedom.

4.

She watches him talk his way into the advantage and smiles to herself. Yes, Sybil thinks, her instincts were right, as sharp as they should be with her Levinson/Crawley blood. He's only a junior partner, but in time he will be so much more than a mere disciple. And, perhaps, their later life will be known as the Gospel of Tom and Sybil. Full of magnificent deeds, though Sybil's fairly certain that his conversion will always be their greatest miracle.

_Miracle: A highly improbable or extraordinary event, development, or accomplishment._

Because God knows it should never have happened, will never happen again. Together they have transcended all boundaries, defied all expectations and conventions; together they have achieved the impossible, even if her aura is no longer so pure, her halo a little dented. They are each other's salvation: hers from a life of monotony and dispassionate assignments, his from a life of dirtier sin and obscurity.

They rise together, a pair of mismatched angels, solemn in their devotion to their chosen causes and brilliant in the blazing light of their love, the blazing light of the manor house going up in flames. It's almost pagan, the way they watch the flames lick the night sky, but they glow like the golden murals of the angels in Istanbul.

5.

If the war has taught Matthew anything, it's that patience brings reward and planning reaps dividends. If the war has done him any good (because it has also wreaked havoc in wedging him and Mary apart), it is good that benefits the Firm, as he has come to think of those who make their home in Downton. If the war has brought him anything, it has brought him the Swires.

Mother and the vicar taught him selflessness, that rich men face damnation; but a childhood of struggling and the other Crawleys have shown him the other way to live. His is a deceiving face: blond hair, blue eyes, soft cheeks don't suggest an innate hedonism, but he's learning to live for the richness of the moment, and what riches are promised by Reginald Crawley. _There's a lot of money_, he later tells Mother, _not that you'd know it from his way of living_. The truth is, the Big House has taught Matthew to smell an opportunity and Lavinia, with hair like gold-spun straw, was saturated in it.

Route A (like crawling under barbed wire, hiding from the fatal gaze of a searchlight in No Man's Land) is simple: marry Lavinia, off Reginald, get the money, off Lavinia. It's what any Crawley worth his salt would do, and he thinks he's cracked it, thinks he's finally becoming one of them. Route B (tossing the grenade back in the direction it came from with a fervent prayer that it's not too late, retreating to lose the battle but win the war) is harder, but it's less mechanical, more instinctive and the awakened soldier within him approves. A tragedy that Influenza took one as young and beautiful as Lavinia; a crying shame that Reginald couldn't survive the blow. His only child, you see, he has no wife.

So all that remains for Matthew is to hide the arsenic, tie up the loose ends and wait. The patience war instilled is profound; its cunning is remarkable, his implementation perfect as he forges a Will and waits for the letter that lets him know the so-called beneficiaries could not be found. How very middle-class, he smirks when it all pays off, for a Crawley to use a lawyer to sort their problems.

Not so, disagrees Mary, in between delirious kisses; it's ingenious. Inspired. She tells him that he has risen so high, that he stands tall on the mountain and can teach them all something.

It hasn't come naturally, but war has also taught him to live for himself. "Carpe diem," he murmurs against alabaster skin, caught up in a lusty and unholy embrace.

_Proverbs 27:1: Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring._

6.

She still prays for him, however much she wishes she didn't. It's not exactly an ordinary practice for someone who does what she does, for someone who is what she is, and he doesn't deserve it. She wants to wash her hands of him, absolve herself and, above all, live; but memories flow through her mind like blood from stigmata and prayers seem to be the only remedy.

Mary and Sybil have it so easy, Edith thinks, loving men who join them in this line of business, forging a partnership as sacred as their marital bond. They are revered as people, not just chess pieces on a board to be manipulated and controlled: Mary for her looks and wit, Sybil for her charm. Edith has nothing to recommend her, and it's this vacuum that leaves her prostrate each night. On her knees, eyes closed, hands together, a multitude of prayers running through her mind and over her lips. Prayers for the man who was her target, for the man she fell in love with, for the man who escaped.

She hears Mary's response in her ears when it's quiet at night in her room and the others are occupied by lovers: _pray for yourself, you're the one that needs saving_. But Edith knows that she had come so close to salvation, that it had arrived in her life at long last in the form of a widower with a useless arm and a smile like her own. A widower with a useless arm and a smile like her own that the Home Office wanted rid of, that she was assigned to marry and chip away at and remove.

So she prays: Edith prays for the family, that they will stand strong; for herself, that she will recover; for Anthony, that he will live as he ought to. She prays, too, for Matthew, who understood and stood by her, who defied the others and had a helping hand in the failure of the task. She prays that he will lead the exodus, bring them out of the darkness and into enlightenment. Prayers, though, are fickle things and she's not certain that they're heard, when the maelstrom that is death and ruin and ill fortune encircles the Abbey and all those within it.

Her prayers do not fend off the Flood and though the house becomes their Ark, they are sent no warning.

Anthony, she hears through word of mouth, is a ghost of his former self; hopelessly wandering, aimlessly meandering and extolling her virtues to all he meets. Further proof, if ever she needed it, of the fruitlessness of her endeavours.

7.

Walking down the road, pacified only slightly by tea and the weight of her arm in the crook of his, Mary wonders if this is how Tom feels before Confession. Because there's no happy outcome possible, there is only a multiplying of sin from here on in. She's washing her hands of the man she loves, the man they brought into the fold, the man meant to be their saviour who has instead traded their lifeblood, their very existence, for the silver of change and enlightenment.

And oh, Lord, he had had such potential, had done things she had never considered or thought possible. The Swires had been perfect, had been played like an organ during Matins, and she had never felt more satisfied than on the night when he had given her access to the inheritance. It was a marriage of her two loves: Matthew and her family, and she didn't think the prothalamion would ever end.

But Newton's laws were consummate (_Actioni contrariam semper et æqualem esse reactionem_: to every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction), and as remarkable as his progression had been, the regression was agonisingly spectacular. Maybe he had aspired to heights beyond his reckoning, because he had fallen from the verge of omnipotence and locked himself in the adamantine chains of ineptitude; softness; conscience. What hideous ruin, to plummet from the heady beauty of the Swire months to the perdition that was the changes he and Tom had enforced upon Papa, the failure of the Strallan business.

He had fallen, had disappointed her so very much as quickly as he had risen and impressed them all, and there was no Sunday service that could remedy the situation.

Though perhaps the Ascent, the Arrival, the Glory Days and the Fall were merely proof that Galton was correct, because he wasn't a real Crawley. Not in the sense that they were, they who had been brought up on this way of life, for whom shadows and shady dealings were their lifeblood. They couldn't alter his nature, force him to become truly one of them any more than he could let the sunshine in on their dusty, fragmented world. Nature versus nurture, and nature had won out.

Just as it would with their child, who would have the best of Matthew's compassion and human understanding, and all of Mary's ability. This child would be the best of them, in a way that its father could not be.

Second-best is dangerous. Second-best gets you killed.

And they all know it.

But in the end, she doesn't make the call, doesn't know which of her elders plays God and casts judgment. It's a risky move, but then no one does risk better than they do. He might have been fine at the wheel, might have reacted in time and arrived home with two stories to tell: one about a boy with hair like caramel, the other about a man with a glint in his eye. But his nature will be the end of him, one way or another; trust him to be overcome with emotion, trust him to want to deliver the news in person. Trust him to relax and make himself a sitting target. Nature versus nurture, and again Galton is proved right.

Her name swirls round and round in the haze of unconsciousness; a prayer on the wooden beads of a rosary, a benediction of love and forgiveness. And he knows (understands) (appreciates) as he lies prone on the ground, dying, dying, dead. That it was better to have loved and to have lost than to have never loved at all.

_Hail Mary, full of grace…_


End file.
